I didn’t know

I feel like the post reads well out loud. I’ve provide both a read aloud and the audio. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghwT53p01i4

Before becoming a mother I was keenly aware that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  My husband and I talked about what if’s and maybes without committing to much since we had never been parents before and no one was selling a blueprint. We listened to other people’s advice with the sort of glazed over eyes one gets when there are no hooks upon which to hang the well meaning advice. And though I walked in eyes wide open to the fact that I had no idea what was about to unfold, I am certain I was clueless to how wide spread and long lasting my wobbly legs of inexperience would last.

Of all the advice I was handed no one warned me that these human beings charged to my care would break my heart in ways I never knew existed before our eyes met  for the first time. Or that I would sit behind bathroom doors weeping over spilled milk in order to gather the strength to clean it up while keeping their fragile sense of well being well constructed. Because, especially in the beginning, their wide innocent eyes would always be looking into me for their own sense of self worth. And that while I was sleepless, unshowered and floundering in this new role, I would have to deconstruct everything I knew about myself to rise a better human being so that I might pass a piece of that on to this new person I’d give my own life for. Or that my insides would be a constant demolition site of building after building destroyed in the search of solid ground.

I wasn’t prepared for my heart to beat in the outside world with the most delicate protection pretending to guard it. As monsters and disasters formed around each corner proving my own inability to every keep it safe from what promised to hurt it. In the beginning I though this courage would grow alongside their own independence. That some how my heart might find it’s way back inside the walls of my chest where the sturdy ribs would once again protect it. This was untrue. My courage is just as wobbly today though my delivery of belief in them has gotten better at masking the quiver in the words I share to support their wild adventuring.

I mistakenly thought my competence would grow alongside the years of practice being a parent. It might be the most humbling lesson of them all to realize just when I chomp down on my own sense of confidence life saddles up with a slap to the face that reminds me just how temporary it all truly is. Falling to my knees in near despair I see the sliver of hope that pulls me back. The temporariness of it all is the true beauty. It promises me a chance to choose over and over again just how I will show up. One moment does not guarantee the next and that is where I can pick up my own misplaced pieces and set them right in the eyes of these tender human beings.

I didn’t know I was capable of a love more fierce than exploding volcanos and tsunamis. Or that I would be able to use that love to send messages of worth deep into another human being simply by sitting side by side in the hard places of being a human being. Also that that love would be the reassurance we each fell back on over and over again when we misstepped along the mine field of living a fully emotional life with one another. And that this love would be loud, quiet, unpredictable, ever growing but most importantly always constant. Before their arrival I was under the impression that love was conditional. But this fierce love is mine to give them over and over again no matter what falls in the space between,  how deep the divide becomes or high the mountain, the love always arrives.